In many applications involving remote communication between people, situational awareness of the relative positions of the participants can vary from a pleasant feature to providing critical information. For example in search and rescue applications, it can be critically important to know the relative heading to other team members as they speak. In social applications, spatial audio may merely create a richer and more enjoyable user experience. When people are within natural speaking distances of each other, the relative positions of speakers is immediately conveyed by the perceived direction of their voices. Providing the same directional advantages enjoyed by collocated speakers to geographically distributed remote speakers could significantly enhance their situational awareness.
Remote communication systems usually need to support multiple actively speaking users. However, current radio and walkie-talkie systems only support a single active speaker at a time per radio channel. In the case of more than one active speaker, all the speakers or all the speakers except the loudest may be garbled.